


Like One of Your French Girls

by CharityLambkin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, Nude Modeling, Steve Rogers Feels, Virgin Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 01:25:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6264025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharityLambkin/pseuds/CharityLambkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Draw me like one of your French girls,” he slurred before letting his head fall back on the armrest and promptly falling asleep.</p><p>The lazy comment startled Steve enough to still the pencil in his hand.  He raised his eyes to really look at Tony instead of tracking him in his peripheral vision.  But Tony was already oblivious to the world, the empty glass resting in a precarious angle in his hand.</p><p>Steve wondered how, exactly, Tony knew about the French girls.  Well, it had only been the one girl.  They spent quite some time in France, the Commandos that is, and there had been many girls.  But there was one girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like One of Your French Girls

Tony was stinking of good bourbon when he tripped down the step into the sunken living room and collapsed onto the couch opposite of Steve.  He hiccupped and eyed Steve with an unsteady gaze.  His bloodshot eyes blinked owlishly at the sketchbook in Steve’s hands and he went to take a drink from his glass, starting when he found it empty.

But Tony didn’t seem to need any more.  A long, languid stretch preceded a burp as he lay out on the couch.

“Draw me like one of your French girls,” he slurred before letting his head fall back on the armrest and promptly falling asleep.

The lazy comment startled Steve enough to still the pencil in his hand.  He raised his eyes to really look at Tony instead of tracking him in his peripheral vision.  But Tony was already oblivious to the world, the empty glass resting in a precarious angle in his hand.

Steve wondered how, exactly, Tony knew about the French girls.  Well, it had only been the one girl.  They spent quite some time in France, the Commandos that is, and there had been many girls.  But there was one girl. 

They were holed up in some resistance safe house, and it was a tiny apartment with the paint peeling off the walls, but it was a real house with hot running water and two bedrooms, each with a narrow bed in an iron frame.  And a group of girls had come over to meet Captain America and the Howling Commandos, or at least that’s what Dum Dum told him.  Their faces were clean and bright, but they smelled like mortar smoke and too much perfume, and he had seen far too many things by that point not to know better.

But they were clean, and they were bright, and they laughed at Dum Dum’s broken French and absolutely swooned whenever Gabe opened his mouth.  Bucky had picked up quite a bit of French by then too, but he rarely used it—didn’t need to.  He just smiled and led one of the girls behind a closed door.

And Dum Dum took him aside and told him he should take his turn, and it was the first time since he had memorized that stupid bonds speech plastered to his shield that he found himself completely without words.

“I’m saving myself for marriage,” he managed to blurt out.

“What?”

“I’m Christian.  I’m saving myself for…I want it to be special for my wife.”

Dum Dum stared at him for a long moment, as if he was waiting for the end of a joke, but he didn’t laugh. 

“Well,” he said and slapped Steve on the back, “I see.”

So, with Gabe and Dernier’s help, they shoved him and one of the girls into the other bedroom.

Steve didn’t remember a lot from that night because he didn’t allow himself to.  His visual memory had been sharp even before the serum, and now he could recall the finest details if he wanted to.  But he didn’t want to.

He remembered the subtle wave of her brown hair, her blunt fingernails as she rolled down her stockings, the red of her lipstick.  He would allow himself that much, harmless snapshots just enough to remember it happened, that he was in France once in a tiny apartment with his men listening through the thin walls.

It didn’t help that she was experienced and capable and more than willing to teach him.  She tugged on the edge of his shirt.

“No,” he pulled away. “Uh, wait.”

She smiled softly and shook her head and laughed and reached around his waist.

“Stop!” he said, but he was afraid of pushing her away and hurting her, so he backed up farther until he was against the door.

But she got the message.  She backed away, too, and sat on the thin mattress.  The metal bed frame creaked under her slight weight and Steve winced to think of what his too-dense body would do to it if he tried.  Better to leave it to someone else and take the floor.

She crossed her arms and waited, curiosity and disappointment warring across her face.  She was very pretty, Steve had to admit, and the way she sat so straight and assured, even after being rebuked, made Steve appreciate her a little more.

If he dismissed her, he doubted she would take it personally, but then one of the other guys would just take his place.  The wave in her brown hair and the way she pursed her red lips as she stared at him made him think too much of Peggy, and he just couldn’t do that.

He glanced around the room, and there was his rucksack along with Bucky’s.  He dug into it and pulled out a battered leather notebook and a stubby pencil.  The girl, watching him with vague interest, brightened when she recognized what was in his hands.  She waved him closer.

“I…can…see?” she asked hesitantly, obviously braver with her English than he was with his French.

He flipped open to something safe: a sketch of Bucky, smiling over a cigarette he was rolling.  She smiled and looked at him, then back at the drawing to study the detail.  He followed her eyes as they traced the strands of Bucky’s hair, around the creases near his eyes, and she smiled wider when she saw the easy laughter on his face and the dirt under his nails.

Steve gestured at her with the end of the pencil, then flipped to an empty page and looked at her questioningly.

She nodded.  And, before he could stop her, she stood up and shucked her dress off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. 

Steve coughed and dropped the pencil, but that gave him an excuse to avert his eyes and look for it on the floor.  It rolled against her feet as she was stepping out of her stockings, and she reached down and picked it up and offered it back to Steve.

He took it, but he couldn’t meet her eyes, and he could feel his cheeks burning red. 

“You don’t have to…I’ve never drawn…”

She laughed and laid down on the bed with her head propped up with one hand.  She drew one leg up to half conceal the dark hair between her legs, but her full breasts rose and fell with each of her breaths.  She smiled at him when he dared to look at her face.

“Ok…whatever makes you comfortable.”

He spent all night drawing her, sketch after sketch, and she delighted in being his model because he was a good artist before the serum, and now he could almost make his drawings as good as the picture in his head.  And he wanted to get the details of her face exactly right because he had to concentrate on how much she did not look like Peggy.

Because it was Peggy that he wanted to draw.  He remembered her face better than a photograph because a photograph could never do her justice.  But he carried her photo because it was tactile, and he liked the feel of it in his hands.  He liked to look at it and make compare it to his memory to make sure it still shined brighter.  But he would have liked to have had the chance to draw her.  He thought, with the right colors, he could draw her better than the cameras could capture.

He didn’t dare, though.  He did once, in his field notebook without really thinking about it, and as soon as he was done he ripped the page out and threw it into the fire.  But then Colonel Phillips had been suspicious about the missing page enough that he didn’t want to risk it again. 

Captain America couldn’t be caught fantasizing about his superior officer when he was supposed to be out fighting Hydra.

So he poured as much as his longing as he could into the drawing of the French girl in the bed in front of him.  She was pretty, but too thin.  Even if she could throw a punch, it would hardly bruise a peach.  She smoked, too, all the cigarettes that Steve gave her out of Bucky's pack. Her hair was curlier and darker, and he focused on these differences as much as he could.

Steve had let her keep the drawings she liked.  He gave one to Bucky, later, and to Dum Dum.  There might have been one or two left in his sketchbook, too.

And it made sense that if the Army had kept all his other field books, they probably kept that one, too.  He was lucky they hadn’t been on display in the Smithsonian

Steve shook his head.  He could feel his ears burning even though Tony was the only one around and he was so drunk that, even awake, he probably wouldn’t notice.  But Steve wondered which one of the drawings, exactly, Tony was referring to.

He had never told anyone about that night with that girl because it wasn’t operational information and the only people he would have told about it were there to witness it.  It was just something that happened in the war. 

But of course everyone in this new world knew everything about him.  They knew through Peggy and Howard and Dum Dum and the few things he’d left behind at base.  So it wasn’t the whole story, not like as if Bucky had been the one telling it but Bucky wasn’t around to tell anyone anything, but it was enough that people felt they knew him better than he knew himself.

And sometimes they did.  He would start telling a story about the Commandos and whoever he was talking to heard it before in history class, or read it in on Wikipedia or something. 

In the meantime, his eyes refocused on his teammate as he brought his awareness back to the present. 

Tony was a wreck.  His mouth was open and he was snoring softly.  The glass had fallen out of his hands to rest on the couch cushion, and his black t-shirt was stained with grease from engines or pizza—or eating pizza while working on engines.

Steve flipped to a new page.  Draw him like one of his “French girls.”  Steve scoffed and began mapping the frame of his body with light pencil strokes, just the slope of his shoulders as he slumped back against the couch and the long line of his legs stretched out in front of him.  His head was tipped back, which gave Steve a great view of his open mouth and up his nose.

A snore caught the wrong way in Tony’s throat and he coughed.  Even still asleep, his hand pressed against his chest, right against the arc reactor as if to brace it against the strain of coughing.  He frowned, but didn’t wake up, then rolled over so that he laid full length on his side, his head pillowed on his folded arm while the other still rested against the arc reactor.  The new position stopped his snoring, and he sighed before slipping deeper into sleep.

Steve flipped the page again and started over.  This angle was better.  The city skyline in the window behind the couch was a much better background without Tony’s open mouth blocking it, and the late afternoon sun highlighted the messy curls on the top of Tony’s head.  The sides were shorn shorter than the top—apparently he’d singed himself in the armor on one side of his head and Natasha had tried to cut the other side to match, but it was a mess.  Bruce suggested that he just buzz it all short, which appalled him to no end. His goatee was shorter, too, and didn’t reach all the way along his jaw as he’d been wearing it lately.  It looked more like the photographs he saw of Tony when he’d first became Iron Man.

The sound of the pencil scratching on the paper was very loud considering how quiet Tony’s breathing was now.  Steve started filling in the details of Tony’s face on the paper.  Their latest bout with Hydra had not been easy on the engineer, and the strain was clear.  Both eyes were bruised, though the right one was far worse than the left, swollen almost shut.  His dark eyelashes fluttered against purpled skin as he slipped into REM sleep.  A cut across his eyebrow showed a little toothy row of stitches, and Steve wondered how he managed to always reopen that same cut without getting a scar.

Tony’s lips were very red, mostly from a bloodied lip that he couldn’t stop worrying with his teeth when he thought Steve wasn’t looking.

Steve switched graphite for a red pencil and filled in the flecks of blood along the stitches and the blood on his lips. 

Red was a strange one, still.  So many things were different after the serum, but he was least prepared for how different everything looked.  He was taller, for one, and he could see farther from the new vantage point.  But the color--he didn’t know what he’d been missing, especially because he could see some color.  Color blind didn’t exactly mean he saw the world in black and white, no matter how much Bucky would argue that, pal, you’re wrong, you kind of do.  But he hadn’t been prepared for how red Peggy’s lipstick was, or the million different shades of auburn in her hair.  He still hadn’t been prepared for vividness of the chemical fire in the hydra camp in Italy, or the red blood trickling from Bucky’s eye when he pulled him up off that table. 

Steve put the red pencil down and picked up the other one instead.  He used the graphite to darken the shadows around Tony’s eyes.

He hesitated when he came to Tony’s torso.  A rough sketch of the shape of his shoulders and arms was easy…but Steve had been planning to draw him nude, and it had been a funny thought to draw him like the over-muscled comic characters that he and Bucky had been turned into.  But Tony’s blacksmith arms were curled around his body in defensive exhaustion.  His knees were pulled up to his chest, and he looked tired and worn out.  He wasn’t so much a hero in repose as a troubled man trying to find a moment of peace.

Steve did draw him nude, even though he had to fill the details in by memory.  Something about the way that Tony stumbled in, already wasted, and passed out right next to Steve…part of him was annoyed at Tony’s constant drinking, but a growing part of him relished the trust that Tony showed to him in this moment of vulnerability.  Tony knew Steve didn’t like the drinking, but it was worth the risk to black out near someone safe.

Tony might be wearing clothes, but he was naked just the same.

Steve had already started in a realistic style, so he continued on, sketching the outline of muscles across Tony’s chest.  He added the arc reactor, but didn’t try for the details.  Steve didn’t really want Tony to know he could draw every tiny rivet and coil from memory.  Things like that made him nervous.  Steve made it the light source instead, and added shadows and highlights along Tony’s neck and jaw to adjust for the arc reactor’s glow.  The decision was hard, but he did add the scars on his chest in light pencil strokes, as if the light from the reactor washed them out of view.

The sinuous dip of Tony’s waist led to the curve of his ass, which was quite obvious in the thin sweatpants he was wearing anyway.  He was lying with one knee bent forward, twisted on his side so his hips were easily hidden in shadow.

On second thought, Steve drew Tony’s cock anyway.  He knew what it looked like because Tony had an amazing lack of modesty.  An image of a naked Tony wasn’t difficult to conjure.  Or find online if he really needed a reference beyond his—sometimes unfortunate—photographic memory.

The rest was easy—just a series of ovals of hard calf muscles, bony knees and round toes curled into the couch cushions. 

Steve looked at Tony, at his portrait, then back to Tony again.  It was good enough, and Steve was done with winding around that memory for a while.  He signed the page S. Rogers and tore it out of his book. 

He was going to leave it right on Tony’s face, so he’d be sure to find it when he woke up.  Then he thought that was too juvenile, so he left it right next to him on the couch.  But then Steve looked at it again.  It was obscene.  Really he shouldn’t be drawing such things and leaving them around.

But as he reached down to pick up the paper, Tony woke up and his fumbling hand brought it closer to his bleary eyes.

“What’s this?” he said, his voice gravelly with sleep and whiskey.  His eyes took a moment to focus, then they grew big.  “Well you’re a regular Jack Dawson.”

Steve didn’t recognize the name.  Must be some contemporary artist he still didn’t know about yet.

“Who’s Jack Dawson.”

Tony stopped ogling his own portrait and stared at Steve hard over the edge of the paper.  “Titanic?  Rose and Jack?  ‘Draw me like one of your French girls’?”

Steve stopped him with a wave of a hand.  “What about the Titanic?  I’m lost.”

Tony stilled, too. “Steve, have you seen the movie _Titanic_?”

“No.”

Rubbing the bleariness from his eyes, Tony tried to sit up straighter and study the drawing. 

“Steve, what, exactly, did you think I was talking about when I drunkenly requested you to draw me?”

“You’re still drunk.”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“It’s a boring story.  Nothing happens.  You probably know it anyway.”

“I know absolutely no stories about any drawing any—apparently nude—girls ever.”

“Well, it was me and the Commandos, and Bucky, of course, and it was the first time in weeks we were in a safe house with hot water…”


End file.
